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Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Interview with Andy Gavin, Author of Untimed

Today, I have Andy Gavin with me. His YA novel Untimed recently released through Tribute Books. You can find my review over on YA Bound.

Charlie’s the kind of boy that no one notices. Hell, even his own mother can’t remember his name. And girls? The invisible man gets more dates.

As if that weren’t enough, when a mysterious clockwork man tries to kill him in modern day Philadelphia, and they tumble through a hole into 1725 London, Charlie realizes even the laws of time don’t take him seriously.

Still, this isn’t all bad. In fact, there’s this girl, another time traveler, who not only remembers his name, but might even like him! Unfortunately, Yvaine carries more than her share of baggage: like a baby boy and at least two ex-boyfriends! One’s famous, the other’s murderous, and Charlie doesn’t know who is the bigger problem.

When one kills the other — and the other is nineteen year-old Ben Franklin — things get really crazy. Can their relationship survive? Can the future? Charlie and Yvaine are time travelers, they can fix this — theoretically — but the rules are complicated and the stakes are history as we know it.

And there's one more wrinkle: he can only travel into the past, and she can only travel into the future!

Hi, Andy! Thanks for dropping by to talk a little about
Untimed.

What made you choose to have part of your book take place in
1725 London?

I love history and at first I thought about going to the
ancient world, which is my real passion, but I wanted to avoid over-indulging
myself and for this first outing stay with a time, place, and celebrity that
wasn’t so alien. If I was going back that far, I’d want to capture the
monumental shifts in mindset, and it was too much for the first in the series.

Somehow, I always imagined Charlie in Philadelphia, and that led me
quickly to Ben Franklin, who is a favorite of mine. In an alternate dimension there
exists a simpler Untimed, woven
between modern and 18th century Philly. No London. No France. No
China. That book would have been more like a Hollywood story, all packaged up
neat and clean, but neat and clean isn’t the Andy Gavin style.

If you had to compare Charlie to a well-known historical
figure, who would it be?

Hmmm. That’s a stumper. Charlie’s his own man. I tried
to make him very likeable and funny but with an authentic fifteen year-old
voice, which means it has a bit of an edge. Teen boys think about shit and sex.
Sorry, but it’s true. I rub up on issues that make some squirm, even if I deal
with the lightly: teen pregnancy, drinking, slavery, etc. But to sweep these
under the carpet wouldn’t do justice to the 18th century – or our
own.

What was the best part about researching for this story?

Reading about the London underworld of the 1720s. I tore
through perhaps 10 books on the topic (not to mention several Ben Franklin
biographies, etc.) but the best was this out of print little book called The
Road to Tyburn which vividly painted the sordid reality. After reading
that, I knew I had to delve into the seedy side. Also great fun was combing
through the two cant dictionaries I found, one from the 1737 and the other
published in 1811. The number of hilarious sexual slang words is uncountable
and it was a blast to disguise the nasty bits of Yvaine’s and Donnie’s dialogue
with obscure cant.

If you could travel to any time, what would it be?Personally, I’d love to visit the ancient world, mostly the great
cities. Rome in different eras (Republican, Imperial, etc.). Egypt during the
peak of the New Kingdom. Pericles’ Athens. Justinian’s Constantinople.
Alexander in Babylon. All good stuff. We can bet that Charlie will be heading
downtime sometime in the future… uh, his meta-future that is.

What song best fits this book? I’m not sure, but while writing it I listened a hell of a
lot to the Daft Punk Tron Legacy
album. It seems to fit.Thanks, Gavin!If you want to check out Gavin's book, you can find it in paperback or on Kindle. And here's a giveaway as part of the blog tour:a Rafflecopter giveawaySo, what do you think of the book?

Sounds like fun. There's nothing like the underbelly of a big city as a great novel setting, and I'm sure the 18th c historical detail will make this one pop! Best of luck, Andy. Thanks for sharing the interview, Kelly.

About Me

Kelly Hashway fully admits to being one of the most accident-prone people on the planet, but that didn’t stop her from jumping out of an airplane at ten thousand feet one Halloween. Maybe it was growing up reading R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books that instilled a love of all things scary and a desire to live in a world filled with supernatural creatures, but she spends her days writing speculative fiction. Kelly’s also a sucker for first love, which is why she writes romance under the pen name Ashelyn Drake. When she’s not writing, Kelly works as an editor, and also as Mom, which she believes is a job title that deserves to be capitalized.